FAQ
What is the license key and why is it necessary?
Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd requires a valid license key to run. You can get a license key for free from the Buoyant portal.
Does the license key expire?
In most BEL installations, the license key is refreshed automatically and will remain active indefinitely. In air-gapped environments, licenses have a an expiration date—typically a year from issue. After expiration, the Linkerd control plane and proxies will continue to run as normal, but will issue warnings that license has expired. The lifecycle automation operator will no longer upgrade or install Linkerd. At this point, you should refresh your license.
What is the difference between BEL stable releases and open source edge releases?
Buoyant is the creator and maintainer of Linkerd. All Linkerd development happens “on main”: all changes, whether in support of upcoming new features, refactors, bug fixes, or something else, land on the main git branch where they are all merged together.
From this workstream, we publish two types of Linkerd release artifacts:
In open source, we publish edge releases. These contain the latest code in from the main branch at the point in time when they were cut. This means they have the latest features and fixes, but it also means they don’t have semantic version guarantees for upgrades: Upgrading between edge releases may involve breaking changes, and may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out.
For BEL, we publish stable releases, which follow semantic versioning guarantees and are designed to introduce minimal change to an existing system. In stable releases, we take the specific bug fix changes (or, occasionally, feature additions) and backport these changes against the code in the previous stable version. This minimizes the overall delta between releases. We also do any additional work required to ensure that upgrades and rollbacks between stable releases are seamless and contain no breaking changes.
In short: edge releases optimize for having the latest and greatest features; stable releases optimize for stability and low-risk upgrades.